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CMO’s Guide to Digital Media Planning

By Team #ARM Worldwide
February 15, 2018

The digital boom and advancement have changed forever the way marketing is being done. Today, more and more marketers are shifting towards online marketing from traditional marketing methods. This has led to the setting of new trends such as digital media planning and buying. Many marketers are preferred allocating a chunk of their marketing spend towards online inventory rather than physical inventory. Digital media planning entails the development and execution of online ad campaigns through different channels such as social media platforms, search, display and mobile advertising. To implement a successful digital media buying plan, a marketer must possess the expertise and a lot of patience. As a CMO, you might have considered allocating a significant portion of your marketing spend towards digital media planning. Here are a few important tips you should keep in mind while implementing your digital media planning strategy in order to increase your ROI from it :

1. Focus on overall development

Digital marketing is a function which cannot be executed depending on a marketer’s whims and fancies. It needs to be executed with dedication and a proper direction. Most online campaigns fail to generate expected results since they lack a solid plan and direction. While traditional marketing campaigns do not require much of planning and direction, online campaigns require a strategic media plan to be crafted before the creative plan is ever conceived. In order to develop a successful digital media plan, as a CMO, you should be able to answer some key questions such as what are your campaigns goals and objectives, who are your buyer personas and are you able to cater to their needs, do you have a clear marketing perspective and does it align with your brand’s personality, what are the channels which work the best for your brand, is your call-to-action buttons successful in bringing in prospective leads, etc. Answering these key questions pertinent to your overall marketing goals will help you to get a clear picture about whether your marketing efforts are heading towards the right direction and will enable you to make any improvements in your marketing strategy.

2. Identify your Target Audience

Identifying and researching about your buyer persona is, no doubt, a crucial task. A marketer should always perform the buyer persona research thoroughly and should not skip any procedure or step while doing so. It is very crucial for you as a CMO to know who you are targeting, what are their job profiles, and all other crucial information about them. You should be as specific as you can while asking your question. You should ask your marketing team to give you the report about the current web analytics of your brand to understand how your target audience is interacting with your website. You should take note of which elements of the website engage them and which pages do they visit more often. This will help you to identify what resonates with them, and will enable you to optimize it accordingly. You can also study some consumer behavior data from the industry thought leaders as well as research about your target market’s social media trends to obtain deeper information about your prospects. The more focused your target is, the more successful your digital marketing campaign will be.

3. Do Continuous Research About the Marketing Trends Around

A successful marketing campaign cannot be executed without constantly updating yourself about what are the current marketing trends by using all the data available on the internet such as e-books, case studies, white papers, etc. You should also keep track of the ad campaigns of your competitors, and analyze what worked for them, and try to incorporate those elements in your online campaign. Browsing your LinkedIn account and tracking the discussions of your industry peers would help you to gain an insight about what planning and monitoring tools they use and which ad networks would be best fit for your marketing goals and which aren’t.

4. Keep a Track of your Campaign’s Performance

If you don’t keep a track of your advertisement campaign’s performance, it would really be a waste of your marketing efforts, since you won’t be able to know the areas where your ads performed well or where it didn’t. One of the greatest advantages of advertising online over traditional channels is that you can track your campaign’s performance in real time. The data you will collect will help you to get a clear picture about in which direction is your campaign going, and also make necessary adjustments to your campaign to ensure it is successful.

5. Cross-channel marketing

For making an online campaign successful, a marketer should consider adopting a cross-channel approach of marketing, which includes integrating various channels such as email marketing, online paid advertising, social media platforms, and various other online mediums. For instance, if a user, who may be a prospective customer, fills a form in your website, you can follow him up by you can follow him up by providing more information on the topic he wanted to search, through his email, and this may result into prospects leading to sales. Thus, by using cross-channel marketing platforms, you would be able to keep a connection with the customers, and be able to shape up the mind of the customer to buy the product.

Conclusion

Buying online ads inventory through a digital media planning can turn out to be the great asset to you, provided that it is done strategically and with planning. Most of the consumers are now found online, searching for your product and company before purchasing your product. Hence, you can target customers where they are, and grow your customer base too, which would increase your sales and lead to a higher ROI.